Response | Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Reading the commentaries above made me realize that one of the few but crucial benefits of a life of intellectual cosmopolitanism has been the incredible opportunity to meet and become friends with distinguished scholars and writers from around the Pan-African world. I first met Pius at Penn State where we fast became close, personally and professionally, in an environment that was otherwise indifferent to African studies and things African. I can only try to reciprocate his generosity in his introduction to this symposium, the first of what will become regular symposia on this site. He is the one who inspired the idea, who asked me to provide my public lecture delivered on the occasion of being named the first Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pius is simply one of the most gifted and energetic scholars that I have been privileged to know in recent years, whose critical love for Africa is as palpable as it is incisive.

And Amina: We go back nearly twenty years, to our more youthful, insurgent days when we eagerly assailed intellectual and ideological dogmas from the African and Africanist intellectual establishments, which we have now joined through the capricious dictates of age. We first met at the 1990 Codesria conference on academic freedom, which I mention briefly in my lecture, and have kept in touch and abreast of each other's work ever since. A brilliant interdisciplinary thinker, perhaps nobody has done as much to promote African feminist scholarship as she has, both intellectually and institutionally. I have always found my exchanges and conversations with her truly inspiring and rewarding. As she rightly observes, ours is a sandwich generation of African intellectuals bred between the hopes of independence and the crises of the postcolony, which has paid a high price that I certainly did not discuss in my lecture. Whatever its many benefits intellectual nomadism has also been costly in terms of research agendas not pursued, personal and professional lives wracked, if not sometimes even wrecked, by the alienations and instabilities of permanent foreignness, deprived of the nourishing comforts of home.

Ato is another person I first met at a conference who became a dear friend, this time we met at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, in 1997. Since then I have followed his illustrious career with admiration as he built a formidable reputation as one of our most eminent literary scholars. Over the years, I have benefited immensely from his insights and erudition. Indeed, he is one of the few people I discussed ideas about this lecture when he invited me to his class in Toronto last Fall. An advocate and exemplary practitioner of close reading, I was fascinated by his reading of the choices I have made. He is right of course that people within the same generation do not make similar choices, and the choices we all make have implications for our intellectual work and professional trajectories. I am particularly intrigued by his notion that my recent diasporic work while seemingly embedded in a conventional Pan-Africanist ethos signals an emergent post-Africanist sensibility. I look forward to exploring this thought with him over some delicious dinner in Chicago or Toronto or in Accra or somewhere in our diasporic and transnational sojourns.

I cannot claim similar personal familiarity with the last two commentators but I am acquainted with their work. Befitting a renowned and experienced student of African studies and affairs, Ken places my trajectory in a broader African context. Quite fascinating for me is his recounting of the excitement of the early post-independence years, the ferment in African cultural and literary production, which he has done so much to commemorate and publicize in the American academy and in the wider Africanist world. The agony of the neoliberal years is all too familiar, but out of this tragedy, Ken seems to suggest, new African diasporic impulses and possibilities have emerged, and the struggles to research, teach and learn about Africa responsibly continue. I cannot agree with him more.

Sanya's commentary was particularly appealing because it pointed to a truism that many people unfamiliar with Africa, or wedded to Afropessimism tend to ignore, the simple fact that Africa is a serious space of intellection, that I am, indeed all of us African scholars currently resident in the global North, like Amina, Ato, and Pius in this very symposium are products of Africa's schools, colleges, debates, discourses, disappointments, aspirations, struggles, processes, problems, and possibilities, which have never been enacted in splendid isolation but in complex, often contradictory, always changing, and continuing engagements with the rest of the world, for better or for worse. Sanya is right that the transdiscioplinarity, transnationality, transculturality and cosmopolitanism of my scholarship and personal and professional lives had their roots in this most misunderstood and maligned of continents: Africa. For putting the point better than I did in my lecture, I thank him.